Has anyone used this UIU program, that basically solves the whole HAL issue, and you no longer have to worry about having tons of different images?

jasonmluna

Do you have a link?

Concerning the restoration of an image to dissimilar hardware, the following two threads may be of interests:
    http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1136486359    
    http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1146045354

Hello, here is the link to the people who put together this project for the universal imaging utility, http://www.uiu4you.com/. I would like to check it out. We have so many different PCs with different HALS.

Just to chime in:
I think this is very, very important.  

I've never heard of Universal Imaging Utility, but I'm not quite clear on the benefit of it vs. other Symantec products out there.

According to the UIU website, UIU costs $20.14 per seat with minimum 50 licenses.  So to use UIU you would also have to have an enterprise or site license for 50 copies of Ghost x ($39.20 each for Symantec Solution Suite), which raises the question why do you want UIU?

The answer is the management, deployment, and restoration of dissimilar hardware in a company environment.  For that how is UIU different from Symantec's LiveState Recovery 6.0 (Restore Anywhere Option)?  Or, Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite 2.0?

Both of those products appear targeted at company wide management and deployment of backups in a corporate environment.

Also, don't forget it's not just the deployment of a master backup to 50 PC's that is wanted.  It's the backups of 50 PC's so that when you restore the image after a client hardware failure, you restore all the user's software and settings as well as the operating system.

I'm not saying UIU is good or bad; I would like to hear though from someone who has evaluated the Symantec products as well and compared the whole lot.

My experience with the UIU has been very productive. The benefit is gained when you have multiple hardware platforms you have to support. UIU handles/discovers all the hardware drivers automatically without having to manually insert them into your image.  

UIU Does not replace Sysprep or Ghost.  It uses Sysprep during the UIU process and Ghost is used after UIU is complete.

The company allows downloads (that expire) of a trial version of the UIU.  

http://www.uiu4you.com/free_trial_p1.html

I'm not involved with the company, just a user.

So your company had to buy minimum 50 licenses (x 20.14 = $1007)?

I guess that's fine for a company but kind of steep for home/consumer user.

http://www.binaryresearch.net/products/the_universal_imaging_utility/purchase

Yes, I'm fortunate to work for a company willing to listen to a suggestion.  It was not an easy process nor painless, and took me 15 months to get the powers to be to realize it was not a bad idea.  No one has ever said UIU was intended for the home user.